Amalia E. Gnanadesikan – författare

An exploration of the original Information Technology – the writing systems of history The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet explores the origins, historical development, adaptations, linguistic properties, cultural context, and social impact of one of humankind's greatest inventions: writing systems. Now in its second edition, this popular book traces the history of writing from the earliest proto-cuneiform tablet to the latest AI-generated text. Author Amalia E. Gnanadesikan offers an engaging, highly readable narrative account of how different writing systems originated, how they evolved over time, and how they have represented languages around the world. Concise, easy-to-digest chapters cover each of the world's major written traditions across time and space, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Bronze-Age Linear B, New World writing systems, the Roman alphabet, and many others. Updated throughout, The Writing Revolution features new and expanded coverage of the Digital Age, including Unicode, the World Wide Web, emojis, generative AI, and more. Investigating how the creation of writing made the modern world possible, The Writing Revolution: Covers the world's major writing systems as well as a selection of lesser-known scriptsDiscusses papyrus, paper, the printing press, digital writing, and other associated technologiesFeatures engaging examples throughout, including Egyptian funerary texts, Maya calendars, Arabic calligraphy, Morse code, and modern text messagingInterweaves ideas from cultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, literature, anthropology, and information scienceThe Writing Revolution is a must-read for students of writing systems, linguistics, information science, and intellectual history, as well as general readers with an interest in the history of written language.

In a world of rapid technological advancements, it can be easy to forget that writing is the original Information Technology, created to transcend the limitations of human memory and to defy time and space. The Writing Revolution picks apart the development of this communication tool to show how it has conquered the world. Explores how writing has liberated the world, making possible everything from complex bureaucracy, literature, and science, to instruction manuals and love lettersDraws on an engaging range of examples, from the first cuneiform clay tablet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Japanese syllabaries, to the printing press and the text messagingWeaves together ideas from a number of fields, including history, cultural studies and archaeology, as well as linguistics and literature, to create an interdisciplinary volumeTraces the origins of each of the world’s major written traditions, along with their applications, adaptations, and cultural influences

Dhivehi, the language of the Maldives, has received little attention in the linguistic literature, and no other comprehensive grammar of the standard language has yet been published.This work describes the phonology, unique orthography, morphology, and syntax of standard Dhivehi. Plentiful examples with native orthography, Roman transliteration, and morpheme-by-morpheme glossing illustrate the various features of the language.This grammar will be of use both to linguists and to students of Dhivehi.